EX LIBRIS
VINTAGE CLASSICS
H. G. WELLS
H. G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. After an education repeatedly interrupted by his family’s financial problems, he eventually found work as a teacher at a succession of schools, where he began to write his first stories.
Wells became a prolific writer with a diverse output, of which the famous works are his sciencefiction novels. These are some of the earliest and most influential examples of the genre, and include classics such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Most of his books were very well received and had a huge influence on many younger writers, including George Orwell and Isaac Asimov. Wells also wrote many popular non-fiction books, and used his writing to support the wide range of political and social causes in which he had an interest.
Twice married, Wells had many affairs, including a ten-year liaison with Rebecca West that produced a son. He died in London in 1946.
OTHER NOVELS BY H. G. WELLS
The Time Machine
The Wheels of Chance
The Invisible Man
The War of the Worlds
Love and Mr Lewisham
The First Men in the Moon
The Food of the Gods
Kipps
A Modern Utopia
In the Days of the Comet
The War in the Air
Tono-Bungay
Ann Veronica
The History of Mr Polly
The Sleeper Awakes
The New Machiavelli
The Passionate Friends
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
Bealby
Boon
Mr Britling Sees It Through
Men Like Gods
The World of Sir William Clissold
The Shape of Things to Come
H. G. WELLS
The Island of Doctor Moreau
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd in 1896 penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784872106
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Introduction
OnFebruary the 1st, 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W.
On January the 5th, 1888 – that is, eleven months and four days after – my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5° 3' S. and longitude 101° W. in a small open boat, of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently, he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain. His case was discussed among psychologists at the time as a curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical and mental stress. The following narrative was found among his papers by the undersigned, his nephew and heir, but unaccompanied by any definite request for publication.
The only island known to exist in the region in which my uncle was picked up is Noble’s Isle, a small volcanic islet, and uninhabited. It was visited in 1891 by H.M.S. Scorpion. A party of sailors then landed, but found nothing living thereon except certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats. No specimen was secured of these. So that this narrative is without confirmation in
its most essential particular. With that understood, there seems no harm in putting this strange story before the public, in accordance, as I believe, with my uncle’s intentions. There is at least this much in its behalf: my uncle passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5° S. and longitude 105° E., and reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of eleven months. In some way he must have lived during the interval. And it seems that a schooner called the Ipecacuanha, with a drunken captain, John Davis, did start from Africa with a puma and certain other animals aboard in January 1887, that the vessel was well known at several ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally disappeared from those seas (with a considerable amount of copra aboard), sailing to its unknown fate from Banya in December 1887, a date that tallies entirely with my uncle’s story.
Charles edward PrendiCk
1
In the Dingey of the Lady Vain
idO nOt PrOPOse to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain. As every one knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The long-boat with seven of the crew was picked up eighteen days after by H.M. gunboat Myrtle, and the story of their privations has become almost as well known as the far more terrible Medusa case. I have now, however, to add to the published story of the Lady Vain another as horrible, and certainly far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men men who were in the dingey perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best of evidence for this assertion – I am one of the four men.
But, in the first place, I must state that there never were four men in the dingey; the number was three. Constans, who was ‘seen by the captain to jump into the gig’ (Daily News, March 17, 1887), luckily for us, and unluckily for himself, did not reach us. He came down out of the tangle of ropes under the stays of the smashed bowsprit; some small rope caught his heel as he let go, and he hung for a moment head downward, and then fell and struck a block or spar floating in the water. We pulled towards him, but he never came up. I say, luckily for us he did not reach us, and I might almost add luckily for himself, for there were only a small breaker of water and some soddened ship’s biscuits with us – so sudden had been the alarm, so unprepared the ship for any disaster.
We thought the people on the launch would be better provisioned (though it seems they were not), and we tried to hail them. They could not have heard us, and the next morning when the drizzle cleared – which was not until past midday –we could see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us because of the pitching of the boat. The sea ran in great rollers, and we had much ado to keep the boat’s head to them. The two other men who had escaped so far with me were a man named Helmar, a passenger like myself, and a seaman whose name I don’t know, a short sturdy man with a stammer.
We drifted – famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After the second day the sea subsided slowly to a glassy calm. It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has not – luckily for himself –anything in his memory to imagine with. After the first day we said little to one another and lay in our places in the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes that grew larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining upon our companions. The sun became pitiless. The water ended on the fourth day, and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with our eyes; but it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to the thing we all had in mind. I remember our voices – dry and thin, so that we bent towards one another and spared our words. I stood out against it with all my might, was rather for scuttling the boat and perishing together among the sharks that followed us; but when Helmar said that if his proposal was accepted we should have drink, the sailor came round to him.
I would not draw lots, however, and in the night the sailor whispered to Helmar again and again, and I sat in the bows with my clasp-knife in my hand – though I doubt if I had the stuff in me to fight. And in the morning I agreed to Helmar’s proposal, and we handed halfpence to find the odd man.
The lot fell upon the sailor, but he was the strongest of us and would not abide by it, and attacked Helmar with his hands. They grappled together and almost stood up. I crawled along the boat to them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor’s leg, but the sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the gunwale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones. I remember laughing at that and wondering why I laughed. The laugh caught me suddenly like a thing from without.
I lay across one of the thwarts for I know not how long, thinking that if I had the strength I would drink sea-water and madden myself to the quickly. And even as I lay there, I saw, with no more interest than if it had been a picture, a sail come up towards me over the sky-line. My mind must have been wandering, and yet I remember all that happened quite distinctly. I remember how my head swayed with the seas, and the horizon with the sail above it danced up and down. But I also remember as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and that I thought what a jest it was they should come too late by such a little to catch me in my body.
For an endless period, as it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart watching the dancing schooner – she was a little ship, schooner-rigged fore and aft – come up out of the sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a widening compass, for she was sailing dead into the wind. It never entered my head to attempt to attract attention, and I do not remember anything distinctly after the sight of her side, until I found myself in a little cabin aft. There’s a dim half-memory of being lifted up to the gangway and of a big red countenance, covered with freckles and surrounded with red hair, staring at me over the bulwarks. I also had a disconnected impression of a dark face with extraordinary eyes close to mine, but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again. I fancy I recollect some stuff being poured in between my teeth. And that is all.
The Man who was going Nowhere
theCabin in whiCh I found myself was small, and rather untidy. A youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly strawcoloured moustache and a drooping nether lip was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute we stared at one another without speaking. He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression.
Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about and the low angry growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke again.
He repeated his question:
‘How do you feel now?’
I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had got there. He must have seen the question in my face, for my voice was inaccessible to me.
‘You were picked up in a boat – starving. The name on the boat was the Lady Vain, and there were spots of blood on the gunwale.’ At the same time my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked like a dirty skin purse full of loose bones, and all the business of the boat came back to me.
‘Have some of this,’ said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced.
It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.
‘You were in luck,’ said he, ‘to get picked by a ship with a medical man aboard.’ He spoke with a slobbering articulation, with the ghost of a lisp.